Twenty-three years after the EC Comics-based anthology Tales from the Crypt ended its seven season run on HBO, a deal between EC Comics and production company Hivemind is set to bring the publisher's twisted tales back to TV.
The EC / Hivemind partnership is getting started with two different projects. First up is a television show based on the EC anthology series Weird Fantasy, which
featured dark tales of sci-fi and fantasy often with wry twist endings, macabre trappings and social messages tucked inside its vividly illustrated parables. The series featured titan talents of the comic book world, including Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, Wally Wood, Harvey Kurtzman, Joe Orlando, Reed Crandall, Will Elder, and Bernard Krigstein.
Weird Fantasy featured one of the signature works in EC history in “Judgment Day,” a story by Gaines, Al Feldstein, and Joe Orlando that made history as one of the first comics stories to enable and champion the values of the Civil Rights era.
Hivemind will also be producing a biopic about EC publisher William M. Gaines,
a firebrand figure in comics history and an infamous name to cultural crusaders of the the 1950s who targeted EC as purveyor of prurient material that directly led to juvenile delinquency. The 1950s moral panic led to an Congressional investigation that nearly doomed the entire comics industry.
Gaines transformed himself into a leading free speech advocate and, with the founding of MAD (which he oversaw until his death in 1992), became a guiding force of the American counterculture and paved the way for the rise of Marvel.
The Gaines biopic and the Weird Fantasy series will both be produced by Hivemind's Dinesh Shamdasani, Sean Daniel, Jason F. Brown, and Hunter Gorinson, along with Gaines' daughter Cathy Mifsud and grandson Corey Mifsud.
The world definitely needs as much EC Comics inspired entertainment as possible, so I find this announcement to be very exciting.